The 5th Edition of the Judo Festival began this morning with several events across the wonderful landscape of Porec. One of the focus point is the Improve Your Club Seminar, with around 150 coaches attending from 11 different countries. The first session was led by the Vice President of the European Judo Union, Mrs. Jane Bridge. During her exceptional session, Mrs Bridge focused on the importance of movements: acceleration, posture, distance and balance. She further explained the significance of these elements in judo;
“First of all, at the beginning it wasn’t my theme. I was thinking about doing something else,but during the warm up, I have noticed many of the coaches did not have natural movements and probably did not understand the warm-up exercises I was doing. Therefore, I decided to show what those warming up exercises correspond to in different techniques. The importance of these basic movements are the fundamental of judo and if you don’t start to teach them at early stage to children, than by the time they are 15-16 years old, they have big gaps in their physical capacity to apply some judo techniques. It is really important to start learning these things early.”